The first heart-stopper: Show me, 2016, a spectacular installation by Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini. It contains many elements which to my mind are inseparable: sheets of metal presented in an almost "clinical" sequence of deformations to which they have been submitted; the carcass of a red Opel GT, painted that really vivid red proclaiming the sporty nature of a car intended for an "aristocracy" of users; a video which tells the story of its deconstruction, its dislocation, dismemberment, its programmed quartering akin to an unbearable death, shown in a sort of filmic prosopopoeia. Under the blows and thrusts of hydraulic cylinders, the Opel trembles, quivers, cracks, tears and finally collapses on the ground, suddenly become a work of art because of this ordeal.

The film illustrates what we know of mechanical machines: when they cease to function or become unnecessary, outdated, they only survive in the museums that sometimes take them in because what they can reveal of an aesthetic approach has been highlighted. What the video shows is the accelerated process of this "making something aesthetic". All works of art are thus merely a frozen, embalmed, "petrified" arrival at a formal configuration that disembodies it from its own virtù. We are entitled to indulge in shifts between emotional approach and critical analysis.

Placed on the ground, not on a stand, this "noble" vehicle, a warrior and metaphor of a swift horse, is the emblem of its driver, of its absent knight. It lies motionless. The red panels are the avatars of a single escutcheon, a single shield, the heraldry of which is reduced to its single imperial colour: the maw which we might define here as having been flayed. This Opel warrior is literally the exalted Figure, the last moments of which are recounted and illustrated in the video. This commemorative celebration crystallises into an uplifting vanity of vanities of all heroic gallops: of all illustrious lives. It is thus more of a "statue" than a "sculpture".

Yet close to a compression of Caesar in the entourage of Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt, it seems to stand out as a kind of correction to the minimalist influence of modern sculpture, a kind of replica, like a response, which carries it to the borders of new realism. It could be further reduced to a kind of avatar for the readymade. Which it is not. To a kind of illustration of the manufacturing process. Which it is not either. The expressiveness injected into it by the video recounting its ordeal prohibits any fixity of formalistic clarification. This group thus condenses all the questions that form in any experience connecting to the history of statuary and sculpture. It carries over directly to the imperious statue and it is indeed a statue of Genghis Khan masterfully created by Phillip King, to its inevitable fate which it also allows us to discern in the raised affirmation of its power.